


Questions of Faith

by Cjcorrigan



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Do not repost, F/F, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, Police Brutality, Pre-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Queer Character, Queer Themes, Swearing, Welsh Character, do not copy to another site, hijabi basira, no beta reader we die like men, passing mention of underage drinking, queer character written by queer author, romance is protecting your crush from Islamophobic goons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:28:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24211375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cjcorrigan/pseuds/Cjcorrigan
Summary: Daisy was sure the only religion she’d ever know was the Hunt, that is until a new officer is moved to her precinct and gives her something new to think about.ORSome of Basira’s co-workers are bastards to her about her faith. Daisy steps in.
Relationships: Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner
Comments: 5
Kudos: 61





	Questions of Faith

**Author's Note:**

> Just as a disclaimer- I’m not a Muslim, and I write this fic with an outsider’s perspective. I welcome any criticism and feedback from Muslim readers about Basira’s characterization and how I handle Islamophobia in this fic.

The Hunt was the only religion Daisy had ever known, even before she’d known it had a name.

But that didn’t mean she had never had a crisis of faith.

Being a gay cop, even after the Thatcher era, was never easy. Turns out, that even if you did replace the bastards who led the witchhunts and raids on gay bars and BDSM clubs back in the day, it didn’t erase centuries of systemic oppression, no matter how hard you tried. 

Believe it or not, Daisy first joined the force for that exact reason. To take out the trash.

She’d gotten the idea in the late 90s. She was sixteen at the time, and had snuck into a local gay bar with a fake ID. It was her first interaction with the gay community, the first time she’d tasted beer. She was so naive back then, a baby butch with a fresh boycut and leather jacket she wasn’t allowed to wear with her school uniform. Not that that had ever stopped her. In truth, she was rather proud of herself when the school’s nuns ripped her a new one for donning it over her green plaid skirt and white blouse, even if the traditional sweater was cozier.

She’d always been a bit of an agitator, just like her Dad, a staunch Welsh nationalist. So she did the things most “bad” kids did. Listened to loud music, snuck smokes outside the school gates, kissed girls she shouldn’t. Mum and Dad didn’t like that last one one bit.

But she did it anyway. Really, going to the bar was just the next phase of her teenage rebellion. She was pretty excited about it, too. At least until the butch bartender caught onto the fact that she was underage. That bartender was about halfway through manhandling her out the door saying, “Look, kid, it's nothing personal. It's just sometimes things go down in places like this that a kid shouldn't be here to se-"

Daisy was about to tell her to take a goddamn hike and that she'd seen plenty of things no one her age should've seen anyhow, thank you very much, when a whole squadron of police officers burst in and chaos erupted.

Long story short, an hour later, Daisy was sitting in the police station wearing a pair of handcuffs surrounded by a dozen or so drag queens and kings, men in leather, and assorted other characters from the club- the bartender, a young lesbian couple barely older than her who looked scared shitless, leaning on each other for support as much as their restraints would allow. The police were responding to an “anonymous tip” about a drug deal in progress, but from the looks on the faces of the others who were taken to the station with her, it seemed that this an excuse they’d heard many times over.  


They were booked one by one, but it seemed that she was the only one shepherded into the captain’s office after fingerprinting.

The chief- Reynolds, collar number PC2729 according to his uniform and badge- was a white man with grey hair and facial hair that was still a tad brown in some places. He had smile lines and crow’s feet, and for some reason that made her angrier than anything else did.

He gave her a smile as she was pushed into the room and onto a cold, metal chair in front of Reynolds’ desk. Daisy sneered at the officer that had brought her in, pulling her arm from the woman’s iron grip with a little more force than necessary simply for the sake of being contrarian. Reynolds’ smile widened.

As the door shut behind the female officer, leaving Daisy alone with Officer Reynolds, the man cleared his throat and said, “Alice Tonner, sixteen years old, no priors. Booked on possession of a false driver’s license, underage alcohol consumption, resisting arrest, and assaulting an officer. Normally, for someone your age, a first-time offender, I would simply confiscate that fake ID, call your parents, and let them handle it.”

“But?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at him.

“But, assaulting an officer is a very serious charge, Alice. According to the briefing my officers gave me, you struck one officer in the face, elbowed and kicked several others until you were tackled. It makes me wonder if this is truly your first time getting into things you shouldn’t, or if you are simply a repeat offender who hasn’t been caught until now,” Reynolds said.

“Don’t see how it’s your business anyhow,” she challenged. “Maybe I have done something like this before and maybe I haven’t. If your subordinates can’t do their jobs and stop crime, that sounds like your problem, not mine. And if your subordinates didn’t assault innocent civilians in that club first, I don’t think that I would have had to defend myself against them.”

“When criminals pose a significant threat, it is sometimes necessary to use appropriate force to subdue them,” Reynolds said calmly, and still smiling. “It’s simply every officer’s duty to enforce the law.”

“Sure,” Daisy laughed, shifting forward in her chair. “Enforcing a tip from an ‘anonymous do-gooder?’ I don’t think so. Dispatch records and calls to the authorities are public record, after all. Charge me if you want, but the first thing I’m doing if you do is calling my father’s attorney and submitting a FOI request. Do you really want to pretend that I’ll find a call from some worried mum that would justify- what did you call it? Appropriate force?” Maybe having a nationalist parent wasn’t so bad after all. At least it taught her her rights.

Reynolds wasn’t smiling now. “How does a nice little girl like you get wrapped up in a place like that anyway? If you’re so concerned with the quality of policing in your-” he made a face, “ _ community _ , maybe you should try our jobs and see just how easy it is, Alice.”

Daisy saw red. “My name is Daisy, actually, and if you knew anything about me at all, you’d know this little girl isn’t so nice,” she snarled. “Thanks for the tip, 2729. Maybe I will try your job, and maybe when I do I’ll come for criminals in higher places. Like this office, for instance.” She took a minute to appraise the room exaggeratedly. “Nice trophies.”

Officer Reynolds stared her down for a moment. Daisy didn’t know what he saw, but whatever it was, the next thing he did was call the female officer back in and say, “Officer Nicholson? Take Miss Tonner up front and telephone her parents to pick her up. She’s free to go.”

Officer Nicholson wasn’t exactly pleased with the decision to let someone who had struck several of her fellow officers only an hour ago free without even being formally charged, but in the end it wasn’t her call. Daisy was released to her parents with nothing more than a slap on the wrist and a stern warning noted in her permanent record. All things considered, if mouthing off was all it took to get out of an arrest, it made a little more sense now why Calvin Benchley had gotten away with everything for so long.

Two years later when she appeared for her police academy interview, and the officer in charge asked why she wanted to be an officer, she remembered Reynolds, and his too-wide smile and his crow’s feet. She was coming for him. Maybe not even him, maybe just the very idea of him.

At first, it was tough. The other officers made no secret as to how they felt about a dyke like her in their ranks, but Daisy was more ruthless than any of them could hope to be. She closed more cases, by any means necessary and left those impotent, rent-a-cop, busybodies in her dust. When she got sectioned, it almost seemed like the natural next step for a person like her, but now she had scarier suspects to go after.

Years passed, vampires burned, and Daisy never really considered that along the way she might have started to become the same type of monster she joined up to stop. By the time a new officer fell into her precinct, the homophobic pricks that had fueled her for so long were afraid of her. They were at least smart enough to keep their slurs to the locker room. Whenever she did catch wind of them running their mouths, she made sure to give them a scare, and she reveled in the way they fled with their tails between their legs. Or she did, at least for a little while, but soon, it felt like it wasn’t enough. It was getting boring.

The new officer, Basira Hussain, was a new sort of breed, she thought. They didn’t know each other well at first, since at first, Basira wasn’t sectioned like her, but Daisy liked Basira. She liked the way her name rolled off her tongue-  _ Ba-si-ra _ , she would whisper to herself in the comfortable isolation of her own darkened rooms at night, just to taste the shape of the syllables. But most of all, Daisy was surprised to find that she liked the way Basira wasn’t afraid of her. It was refreshing, she thought, to finally have someone around with a backbone.

When she wasn’t tracking, interrogating, or disposing of suspects, Daisy dedicated her time at the office to dissecting Basira’s movements and habits. It gave her an excuse to ignore the paperwork.

Unlike her, Basira likes paperwork. Once when Basira was happily depositing reports in the proper outbox, she caught Daisy staring and demanded in a teasing voice, “What? Unlike you, some of us actually complete our reports, and even enjoy getting work done. Shocking for you, I’m sure.”

_ She’s been watching me, too _ , Daisy thought with a delightful thrill. Daisy plastered on a playful smirk, and stretched her arms over her head, catlike and languid. “What’s that old saying? Something about working hard or hardly working?”

Basira rolled her eyes, but the corner of her mouth quirked up. “Mock me if you want, Tonner, but I don’t mind the tedium of it. It feels nice, to be able to mindlessly do a task and check it off your to-do list.”

_ How adorable _ , Daisy thought.  _ How positively quaint.  _ “I suppose I can understand that. But if you ask me, desk duty’s a waste of your talents. Also, you can call me Daisy.”

Basira raised one perfect eyebrow at her, “And what talents are those,  _ Daisy _ ?”

Daisy shrugged noncommittally, hoping it wasn’t entirely too obvious how something deep inside her purred at Basira saying her name like that. “Well, you don’t seem to mind me being around, so I assume that means you’ve got balls. Someone like that should be out there,” she jerked her chin at the window, “handling the real police work. Not stuck inside.”

“Filing reports is just as important to our job as handcuffing people,” Basira retorted. “Otherwise, how would we account for everything, and make sure we’re not taking advantage of our authority.”

“And do you think everyone is truthful on those reports?” Daisy asked, leaning forward on her elbows, the way she did in interrogation rooms.

Basira was silent for a long time, appraising her, and finally she said, “You’re strange, Daisy Tonner.”

Daisy wasn’t sure she knew what that meant, but she categorized it as a win and moved on.

After that, Daisy and Basira were a bit closer, trading playful conversation whenever Daisy was actually in the office. It was strange, how Daisy was usually itching to go out on assignment, always ready for a stakeout, but now, she actually missed the opportunity to sit at her desk across from Basira for a while.

One day, she came into the office to find Basira crouched behind Daisy’s desk, facing the wall. She was rolling out what looked like a small rug, and tensed when she realized Daisy was standing there, watching.

“Sorry,” Basira blushed. “I just need a place to pray. I usually do it here since the position is right and you’re usually out. I can find somewhere else, if you like.”

Daisy blinked, feeling dumbfounded, “No, no, it’s fine. Carry on. I’ll be quiet.”

As she slid into her chair, and heard Basira shifting, and then begin muttering to herself softly carrying a quiet harmony, Daisy pondered this.

Daisy had never really spent much extended time around Muslims before Basira. She knew Islam was the second most common religion in Wales, but her community had been predominantly Christian. In London, of course, things were a lot more multicultural, with a high population of immigrants and asylum-seekers. But still, she’d never found herself thinking that much about it.

Suddenly, she felt overwhelmed by how much she really didn’t know about Islam, and she was a bit discomfited by it. She didn’t like feeling like she was fumbling around something, and she liked the knowledge that she’d spent a few months sitting across from Basira without giving any thought to her culture even less. Now she was sitting on her desk flipping through a folder and not taking in any of the information, just to stop herself from Googling stupidly obvious questions about Islam while Basira was right behind her.

Unluckily, she didn’t have much time to stew in this, because some of the other officers, Shadley and Packwell, her mind helpfully supplied, began stalking toward them with intent.

Daisy looked up from the file, brows furrowed, glare on, but Shadley and Packwell didn’t notice her at all, their gaze was decidedly fixed on Basira. A quick glance told Daisy that Basira was tuned out, still in the motions of raising and lowering her body to the ground in prayer. Daisy whipped an arm out, and moved to stand, to prevent the other officers from interfering, but she was a second too late, and Shadley pushed right by to stand inches behind Basira.

“Hussain, get back to work,” he ordered loudly. The whole room had to have heard him, but horrified, Daisy looked around, and everyone- every single person but her- was ignoring it, steadfastly going about their business with their heads down.

Basira’s brows furrowed, but otherwise, she made no sign of having heard Shadley. Clearly, she was used to this.

“Did you hear me, officer? Someone’s got to go over these traffic reports.”

“Step off, Shadley,” Daisy growled, fists clenched. “She isn’t bothering anyone. Go do your own damn reports.”

“She’s bothering me,” Shadley retorted.

“And me,” Packwell pitched in.

“I’m warning you,” Daisy told them, doing her best to shoulder her way between them and Basira. “Walk away.”

“Or what, Daisy dyke?” Packwell asked. “Got yourself a little girlfriend?”

Daisy ignored that. This wasn’t about her. It was about keeping Basira safe.

But then quick as a flash, when her eyes were on Packwell, Shadley reached down, put his hand on the headscarf Basira wore, and  _ yanked _ .

Red flooded Daisy’s vision, and distantly she heard Basira make a surprised, pained grunt. Daisy’s body was on autopilot as one hand reached over, grabbed her leather jacket off her seat and tossed it at Basira, and her leg kicked out and smashed into Shadley’s shin hard.

Shadley howled with pain, but Daisy didn’t give him time to recover. She wrapped her hands around his collar and threw him up against a file cabinet with an audible bang. A dispatcher manual toppled from the top of the cabinet from the impact, but Daisy didn’t hear it over the almost inhuman growl that ripped through her throat.

“Don’t fucking touch her,” Daisy snarled, putting her nose right up to his, “or the next time I swear to everything, I’ll rip you limb from limb, do you hear me? Do you hear me?”

Shadley whimpered, pathetic, and nodded. He was shaking. She liked that.

“I don’t want either of you to say a word to her unless it’s specifically related to a case. If I catch you so much as looking at her with ill-intent, you’ll regret it. Now get out of my fucking sight.”

She pushed him with all her might at Packwell so that they collided and toppled to the floor messily. They both scrambled to their feet and got away as fast as they could. The other people in the room hastened to look away, pretending as if nothing happened once again.

Daisy was still seething, sneering at the place Packwell and Shadley had vacated. She wanted to hit something, she wanted to  _ kill  _ something.

Then, as suddenly as they came, the thoughts dissipated as she felt a gentle but firm hand on her shoulder, and heard Basira say, “Daisy.”

Daisy let the tension in her shoulder release, and foggy through the adrenaline, she turned to look at Basira’s stern face, her hijab readjusted so it looked as if it had never been out of place at all.

“It’s alright,” Basira said. “I can handle myself.”

“I…” Daisy began, and then blinked a few times to clear her head. Shame began to creep in. She hadn’t meant to overstep her boundaries. “I know you can, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made such a scene.”

There was something unreadable in Basira’s eyes, but her mouth twitched, and she said. “It’s alright. It’s good to know you’re looking out for me. But maybe next time, don’t assault another officer in the middle of a police station with everyone watching, yeah?” She pressed Daisy’s leather jacket into her hands. “Thanks for letting me use this, by the way.”

Daisy was too stunned to make heads or tails of how quickly the mood had shifted, and soon Basira had gathered up her prayer mat, and had returned to her own desk, quick as you please.

The next day, when it was time for Dhuhr (Daisy had spent some time that night looking up the proper times for prayer throughout the day), Basira gave her a nod as she walked around Daisy’s desk and rolled out her mat. This time, Daisy stood once she was through, and made herself a physical curtain between her desk and the file cabinet, so no one would get through. She idly looked over and ticked boxes on the report she’d been working on before Dhuhr started, but mostly she just stood, feet shoulder width apart so she was ready to protect if anyone tried anything, throwing looks at anyone who passed by.

When she was finished and had rolled up her mat, Basira asked, “What are you doing now?”

Daisy tried to sound playful, but also a little submissive as she spoke, wanting to show Basira that she would listen, if Basira told her to stop. “Doing my paperwork as you’ve so frequently recommended, Basira, dear, and stretching my legs of course.”

“I see,” Basira said, quirking a smile. “And the timing of your leg stretching wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with yesterday, would it?”

“Of course not,” Daisy said with mock surprise. “Not everything is about you, you know.”

Basira rolled her eyes and snorted, “Sure, it’s not. Whatever, see you again at afternoon prayer.”

“Looking forward to it.”

From then on, during all their time at the Met, whenever it came time for Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib, and oftentimes even Isha, because Basira so frequently worked late, Daisy stood watch, and they never had any incidents like the one with Shadley and Packwell again. Basira often rolled her eyes at Daisy’s “guard dog” nature as she called it, but never objected to it. Daisy knew she was being overprotective, and territorial, but as long as Basira was safe and happy, it didn’t matter.

No, Daisy Tonner had never known a religion but the Hunt, but she was beginning to think whatever she had with Basira could be one.


End file.
